Freckled Skies
by P0l4r01d
Summary: "His eyes reflected a little more gold each time they faced each other. As if he had been devouring the light from those stars every evening. Stealing away their shine." (Platonic R27, AU, crossposted)


**Summary: "His eyes reflected a little more gold each time they faced each other. As if he had been devouring the light from those stars every evening. Stealing away their shine."**

 **Genre: General/Hurt/Comfort**

 **Status: Completed**

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 **Disclaimer: I do not own Katekyo Hitman Reborn**

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Tsuna's eyes are bursting with energy, gold and orange mingling like igniting embers to a campfire, a kick of light and his eyes grow wide with awe. He doesn't gasp aloud, preferring to swallow it down to keep the silence's warm hold around him. The brunet watches quietly. A shooting star slides by across the navy blue canvas, almost creating a rippling effect as it disappears into the great beyond. Oh the great, vast beyond that holds more secrets than the most infamous gossiper can ever remember.

He's always wanted to be with the stars, to take his shaky hands eternally quivering in uneasiness, and swim through the thick blues that hold the flickering white lights. Tsuna's sitting on the grassy hill, only a map in his hands and his heart heavier than the future he bears. It is because it was how out of place he felt on Earth, that he envied them, that he envied how brief their glow can be and how forever they can seem. The stars. Yet he couldn't leave, he knew he couldn't; It was painful sometimes no matter the morphine lies he feeds himself, to have so many friends that he loves very dearly, but have that tiny voice in the back of his head whisper to him bad things. Tsuna doesn't acknowledge it, he prefers not to.

 _("They're holding you down from your real family.")_

The air is warmer than usual, a breeze sweeping by here and there carrying with them the taste of bitter ends. His intuition tells him that the warmth will not last long. Tsuna has grown used to it, the word 'temporary.'

It did not take long, the cold rolling in with fog not dense enough to blind him of his dreams. The sweetness the stars deliver onto his skin makes his body tingle with a forlorn feeling of belonging, it was a cloudburst in the midst of a summer's night; the rain pierced through his body like needles, making him feel more invisible than he knew that he was, but there were no clouds so surely the stars must've been fragile with his feelings? Tsuna does not know, he tucks the map away, and remembers that he doesn't wish to know more than he has to. More than he needs to, about the stars that keep his eyes - honey stirring densely with the amber hues of interest - glued onto their foreign dance.

Was it foreign? He knows it isn't, Tsuna's tried more than once to dance it.

A dance looked down upon by the people who bear a thin crest on their face pointing upwards, there be not a single cloud in their eyes; a dance looked to with sadness by the people who has the moon crests facing downwards, and eyes brighter than the sun ready to burn themselves out. Tsuna hushes that one rumoring shooting star, scolding when he tells it not to whisper it the others of what he's done; of the marks hugging his wrists, or the long-gone hugs by the neck from something humanity has made.

 _("Your mama loves you, but not enough if she won't let you go... To let you be loved.")_

Oh do the stars seem to glimmer through the pinprick rain, kissing each drop that stabs at him before the process of sending them through his trembling body. He feels welcomed no matter how cold. Tsuna opens his mouth, not to gasp at the miniature suns hung against a smear of violet ocean shades, but to sigh at the similarity; He feels unwanted when he's the warmest, and always welcomed when he's left to the open bareness of having nobody around. The stars weren't a 'nobody,' though, they were one entire vessel making up the hopes and dreams many people left behind. Sometimes the brunet is scared, waking up from pointless nights of sleep foreboding nothing except the _fear_. No, not of his family dying, that brought upon despair and sorrow; the _fear_ was of him losing those hopes and dreams.

He wanted to be an astronomer. An astrologist. A god damn astronaut, _anything..._ As long, as he's near _them_. The stars.

 _("An inch away from happiness; a second away from succession; a kiss too long from forgiveness.")_

A crashing asteroid of melancholy comes upon him, the pieces landing hot in his mind.

Yet a tear never escapes his eyes, for he never weeps of what he cannot have. Tsuna's learned that the moment the mafia came, and even before when he realized he just wasn't smart enough to be what he wished for. That was okay though, because maybe soon he'll have his body emerged in white lilies - lips pale with the winds of endless nights smothering him with love; eyes closed to hide the mystic wonders that replay in constant reminiscence of the childhood innocence he had, _had_ ; and perhaps, a body fragile, light and empty so that the tears of the twinkling fire in the sky may swim inside, to make themselves welcome when they had done the same for him.

Tsuna doesn't come home that night, although he is accompanied later on.

Reborn, chained in that infant body with beady black eyes misted by distrust, he comes by with a look much different than usual. There's something about the way the cursed man walks when he arrives, almost as though the chains that bound him into an unwanted body, also bounded him down to something else. Tsuna wishes to echo the words people have been echoing to him, but he knows better than to let one person disrupt the single atmosphere of tranquility. Especially when it's temporary. The words, "What's wrong?" is shoved down by another shooting star, Reborn looks to it while Tsuna gazes at the sight reflecting from those glass-like eyes. Reborn has eyes of cracked mirrors, always split in different ways but showing the same thing.

He doesn't dare think of what he sees. If not out of fear and intimidation, then out of relation and respect.

 _("Oh, I did not know - I am sorry, Mr. Reborn.")_

Tonight felt different. Tonight the rain, thumping violently against the concrete behind them, beating down the uncut grass around them, was not shied away - Reborn didn't bring Leon, he didn't bring an umbrella. Tsuna noticed that Reborn just brought himself, and eyes zeroing in on the stars he's grown to love with a familiar hint of fondness; he goes back to stargazing.

Reborn however, is thinking in the same wistful aspect as Tsuna wishing. Back then, Reborn used to stare at Italy's stars as he walked the streets, a much gentler hand holding his mother's while they tread down the sidewalk paths in park streets. It wasn't just 'gentle' he used to describe his hands, it was 'contrasting' too, because now he has the lives of many soaking into his bones, and dreams that were similar to Tsuna's, dusting the walls around his heart.

There was something the hitman noticed about his student; his eyes reflected a little more gold each time they faced each other. As if he had been devouring the light from those stars every evening. Stealing away their shine. But Reborn knows better than to shatter the peace hanging like a dainty star, between them with a remark. He continues to watch the stars blink in and out of sight, always coming right back as the man with chains as a lover, counts the times he's ever regretted being a hitman. Black eyes ignore the way the rain bleeds through to his skin, almost as though the stars were crying for him too - but Reborn thinks otherwise, something as pure and lovely as them, should not waste ink trying to write a new story on the pages of a used book, like him.

They sit quietly, the rumors they think carried away by a cold breeze, shattered by the drops of rain from cloudless night skies. Tsuna thinks back to the words and definitions he's memorized from an old book full of stars and pieces of information, then he points his eyes, and traces out the constellations like a pen to paper. The company of someone next to him only encouraging him to do so, as if somebody else was listening to his thoughts, saying, "Tell me about the stars you know of." They challenge Tsuna's childhood devotion, and in the chilling atmosphere does he embrace the warmth of weeping light.

 _("I was not aware that you too, were bound to the Earth as I.")_

 _("So shall we cry together underneath the lamp of freckled skies?")_

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The end.


End file.
